MSI to use SandForce controller in upcoming solid state drive

Another month, another new entrant into the world of solid state drive storage. Last month Hynix launched their first 2.5-inch solid state drives to the general public and Seagate suggested they would be announcing a consumer grade drive in the near future but now it’s MicroStar International that is stepping up to bat.

The company famous for motherboards, notebooks and graphics cards could soon be launching their own line of solid state drives powered by SandForce controllers. Their name has shown up on a list of partners on SandForce’s website for the SF-2000 series controller with a “coming soon” placeholder.

The introduction of yet another vendor in the SSD market can only be seen as good news for the consumer as more saturation in the marketplace means more competition and lower prices for everyone.

It’s unclear at this point if MSI plans to introduce another cookie-cutter SandForce drive or if they have intentions of fine-tuning the firmware to squeeze some additional performance from the controller a la OCZ. We’re hoping for the latter as another standard SandForce drive wouldn’t exactly stand out from the dozens of “stock” products already on the market.

TechPowerUp points out that this isn’t the first time that MSI has been associated with solid state drive technology. Their high-end GT60/GT70 gaming notebooks are equipped with a custom-designed RAID SSD solution that uses a pair of SanDisk mSATA drives in a RAID0 configuration.